Minimum information principal.
So let me tell you, there's an interesting belief out there in the development community that they
explain everything about the application in detail.
Now, it's not necessarily bad, but sometimes this really good behavior goes beyond its good intention.
And that means that it provides some important information for a pen tester.
So this kind of information sometimes can help us and, well, particularly vital situations, there
may be different ways to get this kind of information.
But I want to give you a few tips.
So the first thing is to read just about all the HTML source files or at least write your own script
to investigate the sources for certain special tags and words you can find in the email comment that
contains any information about the back end of the applications, such as passwords, usernames.
That's golden.
Also, look through the help pages.
Use the demo users if the application has one.
Now, once I test an application, I can see an unauthenticated help document which contains an administrative
demo user.
So it's these types of errors that are, well, decreasing constantly because companies are moving faster
and faster to better deployment and better development environments.
But that doesn't mean they're not out there.
Also, there may be some error and warning directives that are helpful to the general users, such as
your password is wrong.
Save it for a pen, testor, this means brute force the password, because you've already got some usernames,
right?
And sometimes errors are caused in the back end and those can be directly reflected to the user.
And again, for general user, it doesn't have any meaning.
But the hacker or a pin tester is not the same as a general user.
And then one last thing that I want to mention to you, sometimes we can observe all the information
about all the employees on the Web site of the company seriously, all board members, employees, their
phone numbers, names, emails, even way more info than that and.
I'm not telling you that that's a vulnerability or you've got to hide this information, but I really
think that it shouldn't be that easy to find anywhere.
It really does help for the social engineering purposes.